The following is from the NSF website:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114888&org=NSF&from=news
Research.gov, FastLane to be Federated
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently joined the InCommon Federation to provide NSF's research and education community simpler and easier access to online services.
Principal Investigators and Sponsored Projects Office officials from InCommon member institutions will soon be able to access NSF's online services such as Research.gov and FastLane using their unique IDs and passwords from their home institutions.
NSF's membership in InCommon will give users access to single sign-on technology, developed under an NSF grant, which allows researchers at member institutions to securely exchange online information and access web-based resources with one ID and password.
The InCommon Federation doubled in size during the last two years, now serving 146 organizations, including higher education institutions, U.S. government research labs and agencies, and commercial partners. All told, InCommon reaches more than 3 million people in these organizations.
NSF plans to first allow participants from the more than 100 member universities to access a partnership of federal research-oriented grant making agencies at Research.gov and NSF's site for submitting and reviewing proposals, FastLane. For a list of participants, see http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants.
Research.gov, a modernization of FastLane, is a new web portal providing a broad range of information and grants management services for multiple federal agencies. FastLane is an interactive, real-time system used to conduct NSF business over the Internet that has been used for more than 14 years by 250,000 researchers, students, faculty and other research professionals to manage their grants and proposals.
"NSF is always pleased to see important results come from NSF supported projects," said George Strawn, NSF's chief information officer. "In this case, where our Middleware program has contributed to the emergence of InCommon, we're particularly pleased because the relationships between NSF and its academic partners will be both simplified and made more secure by our joint collaboration."
Streamlined access to federal research systems is a priority long desired by the research community, and through its membership in InCommon, NSF hopes to help meet the need.
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has produced a video demonstrating the significance of federated identity. The CIOs of the 12 member universities, including the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago, all agreed to join the InCommon Federation to make it easier for students, faculty and staff to access resources at any of the campuses.
The video is available at the CIC website:
http://www.cic.net/Home/NewsAndPubs/Publications/FederationVideo.aspx
By July 2008, all 12 universities had met the technical and policy requirements for InCommon membership. The pilot project for federation was CICme, the consortium's online collaborative workspace. Federated access to CICme was unveiled on Feb. 17 to rave reviews.
"I am really impressed with the ease of using this system," said Ruth Reingold, the Assistant Dean for Computing Technology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. "The new easy single-sign-on access is beautiful."
At Penn State, the administrative assistant to Chief Information Officer Kevin Morooney thanked him for the federation of CICme because she would never have to worry about forgetting her password again.
"Tracy is just one of thousands of people for whom (federated identity) will make it that much easier to manage workflow and access to information that's important," said Morooney, a member of the InCommon Steering Committee.
The CIC believes that the ability for its faculty, staff and students to use their own campus identities to cross organizational boundaries will springboard its collaborations to a whole new level. It is further harmonizing CIC campus policies and standards that will accelerate greatly the process of federating future, higher-stakes applications.
"The CIC as an organization saw ... the value proposition of doing federation immediately," Morooney said. "You can now get out of the business of managing identity but be in the business of enabling collaboration and information sharing, because that's what the CIC is all about."
Two new case studies released by InCommon highlight how libraries and human resource offices can use federated identity with their resource providers.
One study features California State University's Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and Elsevier's ScienceDirect library resource. The other discusses New York University and PeopleAdmin, a hosted human resource service.
The InCommon Federation provides a framework for participating colleges, universities and sponsored partners to share protected online information and web-based resources in a secure environment. The federation also protects the privacy of individual users who, through a single sign-on system, use their existing campus IDs and passwords to access to these critical online materials.
Moss Landing researchers, for example, travel the globe in pursuit of their scholarly activity. Joan Parker, librarian at Moss Landing, said it is crucial to provide access for faculty and students, regardless of their location.
"The bottom line is that users were demanding remote access to library resources," says Parker. "Because all of our resources were IP-authenticated, remote access did not work."
Because its researchers make heavy use of ScienceDirect, and that resource is part of the InCommon Federation, Moss Landing made the decision to provide federated access.
ScienceDirect knows the advantages of single sign-on.
"Managing access to resources has scalability challenges," says Ale de Vries, senior product manager at ScienceDirect and Scopus. "We have to generate and maintain user IDs, have a registration process, and have a help service for those who forget their IDs and passwords - on top of managing IP address ranges. Federated authentication replaces technologies that are more cumbersome, more complex, and less secure."
At New York University, the human resources office contracted with PeopleAdmin to outsource an online application process, as well as a process for managing and tracking position descriptions and performance evaluations. Initially, 200 people would have access to PeopleAdmin, but that number could grow to more than 2,000.
Early in the process, NYU's central IT office promoted the use of federated single sign-on, providing secure and scalable access for its staff.
"NYU made a very strong case for the use of Shibboleth and InCommon," said Matt Thomas, director of business development and integrations at PeopleAdmin. "Shib has created this great platform and the federation allows all universities to talk together. That matches our business model and our interest. It is a natural fit."
InCommon also offers case studies relating to the federated use of Apple's iTunes U and Microsoft's Dreamspark, as well as course management, library, and career service applications. The library of case studies is intended to display the breadth of activities within InCommon and help IT professionals and others make the case for federation on their campuses.
All of the case studies, including the two new publications, are available at www.incommon.org.
The final in a series of presentations of the InCommon Future report will take place Monday, May 4, from 4-5 p.m. (EDT) via conference call and screen cast.
A slide presentation will outline the key concerns and suggestions of the Future Group, which is developing a three-year plan for InCommon, including scope, services to offer, and a financial model. The Future Group will present a set of recommendations to the Internet2 board by early July.
The Future Group is now seeking comment from the higher education community and InCommon participatns. Your input is needed in order to best express the support and positioning of an identity infrastructure for scholarship, education, and research in the U.S.
The document is intentionally open ended for response on priorities, structures, and recommendations, which will emerge into a final report by end of June.
Participants can call into a phone bridge for the audio portion of the presentation, and log onto Adobe Connect for the slides.
Phone bridge/PIN for audio:
Dial -- 866-411-0013
PIN -- 0181302#
Adobe Connect URL: http://internet2.acrobat.com/incforum/
For more information on the Future Group, and access to the complete draft report, see the InCommon Future wiki.